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Indie Game Studio Amazed At Linux Sales

09-14-2009, 05:50 PM

Phoronix: Indie Game Studio Amazed At Linux Sales

Koonsolo Games, an independent game studio that developed Mystic Mine, is amazed at the rate which Linux users are purchasing their game. We know that Linux gamers are excited for new games, but Koonsolo has released figures showing the proportion of Linux gamers to those on Windows and Mac OS X...

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Good. Linux users are heavily ignored by the mainstream studios and really an untapped market. I wonder what actual sales numbers are and if a small group of developers could make a living leveraging linux users first, still releasing a cross platform product.

I dont buy games anymore that won't run on linux and only use wine for work purposes. I wonder how many users like me are out there waiting for something.

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I dont buy games anymore that won't run on linux and only use wine for work purposes. I wonder how many users like me are out there waiting for something.

I've been doing the same for a number of years now ever since I discovered Tremulous. I have at times been tempted to do otherwise but as people have said, buying a game for the other OS is another vote for "we don't have to worry about Linux, our sales are fine."

Sure, sometimes I wish I had something different to play but then I remember that games should be a pass time and maybe there is something more important I could be doing.

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Big commercial game developers have already saturated windows game market with big names and titles. For indie developers it is easier to get sales from platforms where competition for gamers time is not that hard which pretty much explains the result. Indie devs often make very good games, too often they just get lost on the sea of Internet. This was first time I've heard of that game, looks fun though.

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I've been doing the same for a number of years now ever since I discovered Tremulous. I have at times been tempted to do otherwise but as people have said, buying a game for the other OS is another vote for "we don't have to worry about Linux, our sales are fine."

Sure, sometimes I wish I had something different to play but then I remember that games should be a pass time and maybe there is something more important I could be doing.

Same here. The difference is that I recently bought a secondary hard-drive, being sick of waiting uncoming news from gaming companies (I'm linux exclusive since at least 5 years now). I bought "Far Cry 2". This game is stupid. Especially when Heros of Newerth has been released for linux, which explain probably that I don't play FC2 at all.
I don't think i'll bought many games for windows though.
I wonder how many of windows users are not installing Linux just because "there is not enough games". I guess they are many. The most difficult is to break the circle that say from users "I don't switch to linux because there is quite no games" and from studios that say "we don't port for linux because there is no users to buy our port". And we can also can anticipate that probably not so many people will switch to linux just for a single game that they can play on windows. Linux really needs exclusive AAA title, as they do on consoles. Exclusive titles are platform sellers. But no-one will take that risk on a AAA game that could least 2 or 3 years development for a team of 50 people. The change will come slowly, and such news are great news of changes. Perhaps will it help big studios porting more games to linux. What is the % of various platforms for Heroes of Newerth ? Does S2 has/want to give that information ?

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In the last few years a ton of highly praised games were done by indie or low-budjet studios. Things like Galaxy Wars and World of Goo are well known examples. While these types of games don't always get Linux ports, I hope that starts to change due to the success of other games.

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SaBut no-one will take that risk on a AAA game that could least 2 or 3 years development for a team of 50 people. The change will come slowly, and such news are great news of changes.

Yeah, well, didn't it happen in a similar fashion for MS-DOS too? Windows had the benefit that they inherited MS-DOS games so the platform was already proven when it was made. Linux needs to climb all the way up. The good thing is that if it can do that once, it'll also probably gain enough momentum to keep on going.